Mobile QB Daniels a top Notre Dame concern

Brian HamiltonTribune reporter

SOUTH BEND, Ind. -- Finally, Brian Kelly had a game-week opponent to discuss Tuesday and specific South Florida strengths to pump some helium into. And the Notre Dame coach put B.J. Daniels at the top of that list.

On the plus side, the preparation the No. 16 Irish have done for mobile, dual-threat quarterbacks will serve them well for the first two weeks of the season, not just the opener against the Bulls on Saturday. On the minus side, that preparation is necessarily arduous.

"You have to go over all those things that put the ball in the quarterback's hands, whether it's option or read option or sprint-out or breaking contain," Kelly said at his weekly news conference.

"All those things have to be part of your defensive preparation. We've become accustomed to having that in our defensive game plan because of last year, but obviously we've spent a lot of time making sure we have answers to defend the run portion of the quarterback. That's important against South Florida."

It's important because of Daniels, who Kelly labeled "very athletic" after trying to game plan for him in Big East play at Cincinnati. The junior has started 22 games for South Florida and ranks third in career total offense at the school with 4,787 yards -- ranking third in career passing yards (3,754) and 10th in career rushing yards (1,033).

As a means to simulate Daniels for the first-team Irish defense, Kelly has mixed backup quarterbacks Everett Golson and Andrew Hendrix in with the first-team offense at times in the preseason.

"We've gotten some good work when they're in a 'demonstration' kind of scenario, and then we tried to use some 1s versus 1s with both those guys at quarterback as well, so we're making sure that our defense gets speed work," Kelly said.

"Sometimes when you go in demonstration or scout team it slows down, and maybe you don't have the offensive linemen knowing exactly what to do, so we tried to put them with our first unit as well to give us the best preparation."

Extra points: Kelly said tight end Mike Ragone (quad) "ran (Monday) well for the first time" this preseason, and the senior is expected to be available for South Florida... On the tweaking of the gameday routine at Notre Dame -- in which the team no longer will walk from the basilica to the stadium directly -- Kelly said: "It's one of the great unique qualities that we have here at Notre Dame, that there's such pageantry and tradition. We want to maintain that, but we want to make sure that our players get ample time to be focused on football as well."... Any breaks in receiver Theo Riddick's workload will come on offense. "Theo, in his mindset, he has to be a huge impact for us in special teams," Kelly said. "So if he needs a blow, we are comfortable with Robby (Toma) being in the game, and that's the way we have approached it with Theo and the way his thought process should be."